H8 



WATT, JAMES. 



WATT, JAMES. 



E61 



necessity of his preserving copies of his drawings and letters, which 

 often contained important calculations, and the desire of avoiding that 

 labour himself which he did not like to entrust to an amanuensis. 

 Among hia other useful inventions was a method of heating rooms by 

 Bteaui, which he introduced in hia own house in the winter of 1784-85 ; 

 and he also communicated to Brewster an account of a ' Steam-Drying 

 Machine,' contrived by him in 1781 for Mr. Macgrigor, of which a 

 description is given under the above title in the ' Edinburgh Encyclo- 

 paedia.' Towards the latter end of 1736, on a visit to Paris, undertaken 

 at the instance of the French government for the purpose of suggesting 

 improvements on the Machine de Marly, by which the town, palace, 

 and waterworks of Versailles were supplied with water from the Seine, 

 Watt became acquainted with Berthollet, whose method of bleaching 

 with chlorine he brought to this country, and introduced, with cer- 

 tain improvements of his own, in the bleach-works of his friend Mr. 

 Mucgrieor, near Glasgow, whose daughter he had married in 1775, not 

 long after his removal to Birmingham. He offered to Berthollet a 

 chare in the undertaking, which, from the great superiority of the new 

 over the old process, bid fair to be highly profitable, but this the 

 French chemist declined. Another circumstance indicative of the 

 universality of Watt's talents is his connection with the establishment 

 of the Pneumatic Institution at Clifton, where the medical properties 

 of the gases then recently discovered were made available on an exten- 

 sive scale, inaiuly under the direction of Dr. Beddoes. The illness of 

 Watt's daughter, and delicacy of his younger son, Gregory, led him 

 particularly to devote his attention to this subject, and he designed 

 and constructed the apparatus required for procuring and administer- 

 ing the gases, and wrote the second part of a pamphlet, of which the 

 first part was by Beddoes, entitled ' Considerations on the Medicinal 

 Use of Factitious Airs, and on the manner of obtaining them in large 

 quantities.' This was published at Bristol in 1795 ; aud about the 

 same time appeared two or three editions of a ' Description of a Pneu- 

 matic Apparatus, with directions for procuring the Factitious Airs,' 

 by Watt. 



Since the original publication of this article in the ' Penny Cyclo- 

 pcedia,' great prominence in scientific literature and in the history of 

 chemistry has been given to the respective claims of Watt, Cavendish, 

 and Lavoisier, as discoverers of the composition of water, by several 

 considerable publications ; one relating exclusively to that subject, 

 while it forms the most important part of another, and is discussed at 

 some length in a third. The first of these works is entitled ' Corre- 

 spondence of the late James Watt on his Discovery of the Theory of 

 the Composition of Water. With a Letter from his Son. Edited, 

 with Introductory Remarks and an Appendix, by James Patrick 

 Muirhead, Esq., F.R.S.E.,' Lond. and Edin., 1846. Pp. cxxvii., 264. 

 The editor of this work, it is remarked by the author of that we 

 shall next advert to, " is the most zealous of Watt's defenders, and 

 the most unhesitating of Cavendish's assailants," with regard to their 

 relative claims as to the discovery of the composition of water. 



In the life of Cavendish by Dr. George Wilson of Edinburgh, issued 

 by the Cavendish Society in 1851, and noticed in a former article. 

 [CAVENDISH, HENRY], the third chapter, occupying 103 closely-printed 

 pages, is devoted to the " Controversy between Cavendish, Watt, and 

 Lavoisier, concerning the discovery " in question ; and, subsequently, 

 181 pages are allotted to "a critical inquiry into the claims of all the 

 alleged authors" of that discovery. It must here be remarked that 

 everything that had already been said on the subject was before Dr. 

 Wilson, and that the strenuous advocates of Watt, as well as of 

 Cavendish, had placed in his hands all the materials they possessed 

 in support of their claims, or communicated to him their matured 

 sentiments. He states that the late Lord Jeffrey's article in the 

 ' Edinburgh Review ' for 1848, is by much the ablest defence of Watt 

 that has appeared, while he considers the Rev. W. Vernon Hardourt 

 (in his Address to the British Association at Birmingham hi 1839) as 

 the ablest of Cavendish's defenders. The third chapter of the work 

 terminates with the following summary of the results at which he has 

 himself arrived : " . . . the conclusion regarding intellectual merit to 

 which I have come is, that Watt did not signify by phlogiston, hydro- 

 gen, and did not assert in the equivalent terms of his own day that 

 water consists of hydrogen and oxygen ; and further, that the con- 

 clusion to which he came, such as it was, was arrived at later in time 

 than Cavendish's just conclusion, and was drawn from a repetition of 

 his experiments. For Cavendish I claim that he was the first who 

 observed and inferred that water consists of hydrogen and oxygen ; 

 and to Lavoisier I assign the merit of having simplified and perfected 

 Cavendish's conclusion, and of having been the first to prove the 

 composition of water by analysis. I acknowledge Watt to have been 

 an independent and original theorist on the composition of water, and 

 to have largely contributed to the dissemination of the true theory of 

 its nature." 



To this final conclusion of Dr. Wilson, Mr. Muirhead, in another 

 work, the title of which is subjoined to this article, published three 

 years afterwards, and in which he makes some additions to the state- 

 ments of his previous separate publication, opposes only the following 

 remarks: Dr. Wilson has "the fairness to admit that the date oi 

 Cavendish drawing his inference as to the elements of water cannot 

 with certainty or precision be fixed at an earlier period than the 

 summer of 1783 (Mr. Watt haying, we may remind the reader, made 



iis known in April of that year) ; that he himself believes that 

 Cavendish's views on the subject 'altered and expanded from 1781 

 onwards to 1784 ' (when they were first published) ; and that, at all 

 events, there can be no doubt that Mr. Watt's theory increased the 

 aith of Cavendish and Lavoisier in their own views, and won the 

 approval of the great majority of their scientific contemporaries," 

 kc., &c. Professor James D. Forbes, of Edinburgh, who appears to 

 )e the only writer that has entered upon the subject since the pub- 

 ication of both Mr. Muirhead's works and also of Dr. Wilson's, thus 

 expresses his opinion, in his Dissertation on the Progress of Mathe- 

 matical and Physical Science : " Watt, in after life, may be said to 

 lave tacitly relinquished to Cavendish the honour which, in the first 

 rritation of the conflict of their claims, he showed no disposition to 

 do ; it is therefore reasonable to infer that, on reflection, he saw good 

 reasons for doing so. By this I mean that he suffered judgment to be 

 jassed in favour of Cavendish's claim in the writings of many of his 

 eminent contemporaries, without attempting publicly to correct the 

 all but universal impression which they made. In one instance he 

 ost homologated this adverse judgment. In the article on &te:un, 

 written by Robison, and revised by Watt in his last years and after 

 Cavendish's death, this passage appears : ' This is fully evinced by the 

 jreat discovery of Mr. Cavendish of the composition of water ; ' from 

 which it must be concluded, first, that Robison, the intimate friend 

 of Watt and the almost chivalrous defender of his fame, believed 

 lavendish to be the true discoverer; eecondly, that Watt, in com- 

 menting on this article in 1814, permitted the fact to be thus trans- 

 mitted to posterity. For, in his numerous animadversions on other 

 parts of the same papers, he gives free expression to the sensitiveness 

 which he felt lest Dr. Black should derive any credit to which he was 

 not entitled in connection with the steam-engine ; but he suffers the 

 passage just quoted to pass without remark. Such being the case, 

 and waiving all purely chemical discussion, I am of opinion that 

 Watt's friends should have left the matter as he was content to 

 leave it." 



A new translation has appeared of Arago's ' Eloge,' with notes by 

 the translator, in the ' Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men,' 

 by him, translated by Admiral Smyth, the Rev. B. Powell, and Mr. 

 B. Grant. As this, we believe, is the most recent publication relative 

 to Watt (1857), it is right to say that it adds nothing to the Water 

 question, and that the translator appears not to have been aware of 

 Dr. Wilson's labours. 



The reader will now be enabled either to form a provisional but not 

 unsound opinion on this interesting topic, or to make himself ac- 

 quainted with its minute history, and the arguments adduced on all 

 sides, by perusing the works referred to ; and in this respect the 

 present article may be regarded as forming a pendant to those on 

 CAVENDISH and LAVOISIER, ANTOINE-LADRENT, in preceding volumes. 



After retiring from business, Watt was with difficulty drawn into 

 any undertaking, although on several occasions his advice was sought 

 respecting engineering works. In 1809 the fertility of his inventive 

 powers was shown by a beautiful solution of a difficult problem laid 

 before him by a wa.tcr-conipany at Glasgow, who, after establishing 

 their works upon one side of the river Clyde, discovered that water of 

 a very superior quality might be procured from a kind of natural filter 

 on the other side, if they could overcome the difficulty of laying a 

 main from their pumps across the bed of the river. Watt contrived 

 for this purpose a flexible iron pipe, the pieces of which were connected 

 by a kind of ball-and-socket joint, of which he took the idea from the 

 tail of a lobster. The main was constructed from his designs in the 

 following year, with the most complete success ; and it forms a tube 

 about a thousand feet long and two feet in diameter, capable of bend- 

 ing and applying itself to the irregular bed of the river. In another 

 case, late in life, Watt was prevailed upon, by the solicitation of the 

 Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty, to attend a deputation from 

 the Navy Board, and to give, with Captain Huddart and Mr. Jessop, 

 an opinion upon works then being carried on in Sheerness dockyard, 

 and upon other projected works designed by Messrs. Reunie and 

 Whidby; and on this occasion he received the thanks of the Ad- 

 miralty for his services, In 1813 or 1814 he yielded to the wishes of 

 his friends, of Brewster especially, by revising the articles 'Steam' 

 and 'Steam-Engine,' contributed by Robison to the 'Encyclopaedia 

 Britannica," and enriching them with valuable notes, which were pub- 

 lished with the collected edition of Robison's articles, which appeared 

 under the title of ' A System of Mechanical Philosophy.' The last 

 project to which Watt devoted his attention, and which he appears to 

 have very nearly perfected when he died, was a machine for copying 

 sculpture, with which he had proceeded so far as to execute several 

 specimens, which he presented to his friends as the early attempts of 

 a young artist entering his eighty-third year. Having suffered so 

 much, in other cases, from communicating his ideas to others, he kept 

 the construction of this machine strictly secret ; but when he had pro- 

 ceeded sufficiently with his design to contemplate obtaining a patent, 

 he found that another person in his neighbourhood, who appears to 

 have been entirely unacquainted with Watt's project, was engaged 

 upon a similar plan. A proposal was subsequently made for obtaining 

 a joint patent, but Watt was unwilling, at so advanced a period of life, 

 to embark in such an undertaking. 

 About the year 1790 Watt had purchased an estate called Heath- 



